I have always viewed fortune-tellers with suspicion, having very little faith in the power of Tarot cards or tea leaves to tell us anything. But Josette Bushell Mingo's show, with its combination of circus skills and seeming clairvoyance, almost persuades me that it has the power of prophecy.
The Hanged Man is an extraordinary piece of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo that entwines images from the Tarot with episodes from Homer's Odyssey. And though its deeper significance remains resolutely obscure, its visual impact is exquisitely beautiful.
Bushell Mingo has scripted and directed this arrestingly bizarre piece, which is delivered by an adept quartet of actors and aerialists who spend much of the evening dangling upside-down from an array of slings, ropes and swings suspended from the ceiling. The audience sits around the perimeter of the cubic space as cosmic imagery is projected on to the walls. It feels like an initiation ceremony into a cabbalistic temple dedicated to the negation of gravity.
Doyle Richards plays a Homeric hero with a Jimi Hendrix hairdo, who descends into the underworld to be visited by three mysterious harpies, like the weird sisters from Macbeth crossed with a troupe of Ukrainian trapeze artists. The first dresses as a Victorian widow and sings like Billie Holiday, the second sports a harlequin catsuit and a clown's nose, and the third appears on stilts and communicates through a carrot-haired ventriloquist's dummy.
Since any sustained attempt to make sense of the symbolism will be thwarted, you may as well settle back and admire the expertise of the execution. As a theatrical poem it is dumbfoundingly oblique, but as an extended contemporary circus routine it is frequently electrifying.
Bushell Mingo has had this project in gestation for a couple of years, and its accomplishment suggests that it is certainly worthy of further development. Notwithstanding my aversion to fortune-tellers, maybe there will be a funding body willing to cross her palm with silver.
· Ends tomorrow. Box office: 0151-709 4988.
